Saturday, September 30, 2017

By the tenth hot wing,
pepper turns to pain. Leftover rainwater in an overturned tire teems with
microscopic life while somewhere else an entire community drowns in a monsoon.
A little confidence inspires a first date; too much and you’re a sociopath. The
cleanest, most efficient means of keeping our trillion devices running
uninterruptedly is nuclear—until a seal breaks or the wrong person gets the
codes, and then Earth is a charred, radiated husk.

Sitting here at the bar,
the right number of Jack and Cokes have delivered me to this line. Time to
close my tab before the writing and its author sink to regrettable depths.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

American egos are even bigger than our asses. We're
always Number One, and our colors never run. Assertive as eagles. Prominent as
Mount Rushmore.

Amidst so many megaphones, social squeamishness is a
substantial burden. Some of us should have rather been turtles, hard-shell
recluses engineered for withdrawal.

Really, we could all benefit from a strand or two of
tortoise DNA. A cousin to humility, shyness is as much a spiritual asset as a
political liability. Envision a nation with more listening than shouting, where
restraint overrides impulse, and mindful introspection prevents thoughtless
self-confidence.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Children naturally hyperbolize the
world. From their novel point of view, they experience everyday life in a
partial dream state. To a new mind, reality is a caricature of itself.

The interior of the family car at night, with all its
illuminated controls and aqua-neon readouts, becomes the cockpit of a
spaceship. The doctor's needle looks and feels like a harpoon! Skittles really
are pellets of solidified rainbows.

And that unfriendly elderly lady down the street, with
the overgrown garden from which you must uneasily retrieve your lost ball, is a
terrible plant-woman just waiting to ensnare you in tendrils, cast some wicked
botanical spell, and pot your freckled little ass like cilantro.

Friday, March 3, 2017

We've come to value attention over the reason for it,
turning heads by any means necessary.

But there's only so much meaningful notoriety to go
around, and most of us aren't going to come up with a vaccine or win a Grammy.

So fools rush center stage, bucking and braying for
the camera like jackasses! Each resounding hee-haw lowering the standard for
recognition as it drowns the signal in dumb, hollow noise—and the country is
too busy taking a cinnamon challenge to vote down the forces taking our future.

To influence this circus, the
visionaries will have to get a lot louder and learn to juggle. Chainsaws. On a
flaming unicycle.

Friday, February 10, 2017

We exit the wombas unmolded clay, and then life stretches and squeezes us into the
shapes we become. Genetic predisposition aside, monks, gangsters, and
physicists are created, not conceived, through an existential apprenticeship of
exposure, inspiration, and practice.

It works out all right when your role model is Dr. Phil. Less so
when it's Dr. Mengele.